When attempting to make a rational choice, people with high-functioning autism may be less swayed by emotion than most.
That鈥檚 the conclusion of Benedetto De Martino of the in Pasadena, and colleagues, who found that people with autism tend to make more rational choices than non-autistics when making a decision about whether or not to gamble.
Two years ago a team led by De Martino, showed that most people considering a set of options are heavily influenced by how the options are put to them, irrespective of which option is more likely to benefit them.
Advertisement
Participants played a game in which they had a choice of earning 拢20 out of a possible 拢50, or gambling for the whole amount and risk getting nothing.
People were more likely to gamble when the first option was presented as a 拢30 loss rather than a 拢20 gain, even though there was no difference in the odds.
Autism benefit
People with autism seem to process emotions in an unusual way, so to see how they respond to such framing, the team conducted the experiment again with 15 people with Asperger鈥檚 syndrome, or high-functioning autism.
In these people, the effect of changing the way the game was described was only half as powerful as with a non-autistic control group.
鈥淎lthough autistic individuals do suffer difficulties in certain environments 鈥� such as social ones 鈥� their performance on certain tasks is better,鈥� says co-researcher of University College London.
He says that such research may one day benefit people with autism. 鈥淯nderstanding more about how individuals with autism make decisions in their everyday life will help us tease apart how this contributes to the difficulties they experience,鈥� he says.
, who is autistic and researches cognition in autism at the University of Montreal in Canada calls the findings 鈥渇ascinating and important鈥�.
鈥淎utistics performed with enhanced accuracy compared to non-autistics, responding to the actual task demands rather than being hampered, as the non-autistics were, by the detrimental effects of unhelpful biases,鈥� she says.
Journal references: ;
Mental Health 鈥� Discover the latest research in our continuously updated special report.
